He had been awake for thirty hours, and the numbers on the ledger had begun to move. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
The snow kept falling, patient as a creditor.